Astral Codex Ten

Freud

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Freud

Article

Freud is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 11 times across 11 issues between February 16, 2022 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Teach isn’t arguing that kill-your-father-marry-your-mother is a real secret desire; I think he even claims that this is one a misinterpretation/misdirection that society invented in order to defend against the real meaning of Freud”; “he reinterprets one of Freud’s dream analyses”; “First 10 or so are all Freud reading groups”. It most often appears alongside Sadly, Porn, Lacan, Lacanian.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 11
  • Issue count: 11
  • First seen: February 16, 2022
  • Last seen: January 21, 2026

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Sadly, Porn
February 16, 2022 · Original source
Something I learned when writing this review: Lacan admitted to being deliberately obscurantist. He said Freud was easy to understand, so everyone read the text without deep thought, then misinterpreted it. Lacan figured if he was hard to understand, people would think about it, let the ideas float around a while before forming an opinion on them, and maybe get them right.
(just to be clear, Teach isn’t arguing that kill-your-father-marry-your-mother is a real secret desire; I think he even claims that this is one a misinterpretation/misdirection that society invented in order to defend against the real meaning of Freud)
Teach thinks people do this in the hopes of tricking the psychoanalyst into giving the wrong interpretation, thus providing them with an extra misdirection layer. Something like “I can be sure I don’t want to kill my father and marry my mother, because if I had those kinds of desires they’d probably come out in dreams, but the psychoanalyst says my dream is just about how I secretly fear failure, so I’m fine.” Dreamers do include the real hidden desire in the dream, but only to keep it fair, so that the analyst’s failure counts. At some point I believe Teach suggests that normal people don’t have meaningful symbolic dreams, only people who go to psychoanalysts do, and for that reason! And he reinterprets one of Freud’s dream analyses in a way that suggests Freud got it wrong - not, one assumes, because Teach is better or smarter than Freud, but because the patient was optimizing his story for deceiving Freud in particular, and succeeded.
Highlights From The Comments On "Sadly, Porn"
April 20, 2022 · Original source
It's sort of complicated. First of all -- Lacan wasn't really "writing" (he did write, though, and it's famously inscrutable, I think he said that it wasn't meant to be read at all), he was delivering seminars verbally. The first 10 or so are all Freud reading groups, mostly analysts. They'd choose an essay or a book for close, careful study and then speak on it. He makes reference to this in earlier seminars, like "thanks so-and-so for the great [excerpted from the text] discussion of this week's material", before moving into his own discussion. I've done some of my own close readings of Freud, more casually, and there really is a lot there: read once to follow Freud's train of logic, and then read for the gaps in the text.
Around Seminar XI / 1964, Lacan got booted from the Freudian institute, for being too heterodox. So he pivoted and gave a lecture for more general-purpose French intellectuals at the time, which is why Seminar XI is mysterious and obscure: he's talking to guys like Merleau-Ponty, top brass of the French intellectuals, and invoking Aristotle and Hegel and Heidegger, not doing close readings with a gaggle of analysts. But the results of his earlier close readings form the groundwork for his later work. He gets increasingly esoteric from that point on, IMO culminating in Seminar XX, which is kind of where the groundwork for modern notions of gender comes from (Butler was a Lacanian, although she may not admit it).
Point is that I generally agree. You can't just jump into Lacan with a high IQ and expect to "get it". I know because I and others I've spoken to have tried and failed. Like any intellectual project, you need the lineage (as Scott himself wrote about a while ago in a short fiction I really liked but can't remember the name of), and the lineage here is not common knowledge except perhaps among orthodox Freudian analysts.
Book Review: A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis
April 26, 2022 · Original source
The Lacanian conception of desire. At the bottom of desire is an input/output port (represented by I(O)), and money (represented by a dollar sign). On the next level you get e (approximately 2.71828) and another, smaller input/output port. The rest of desire is left as an exercise for the reader. See here for more information, if you dare. Also, all of this is a metaphor for language somehow, or maybe just literally the same thing as language. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
Inline links: here
Phobia is where the paternal function almost works, and the patient relies on something else to shore it up (no, I don’t get how this is different from perversion). Fink’s example here is Freud’s case of Little Hans, a young boy who is terrified of horses. He goes through the case and finds good evidence that Hans didn’t respect his father, and had to transfer the fear which should settle on the father (as representative of castration anxiety) onto something else (horses).
(though Freud probably would have avoided using that exact terminology)
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Blue: financially savvy, bad at romance, natural leader, enjoys biking …then most people will find that they have some traits of each, but that’s just a natural result of the system being made up and useless. Maybe the problem is I’m using this as a psychological type system, but it’s actually supposed to be a business book after all? The namesake principle claims that overperforming Clueless get promoted to middle management, and underperforming Sociopaths get promoted to the top. This ought to be testable. Suppose we looked at a sales firm, or an investment bank, and correlated first-year sales/profits with promotions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that overperformers get promoted to the next level up - after all, the naive ordinary model says you get promoted for good work. Surely most people who underperform their first year won’t get promoted, but the Gervais partisan could say that yes, only a few very special underperformers are real Sociopaths. So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. I would naively predict the top echelons would be made of former normal-to-over-performers, so if someone found they were in fact underperformers that would be a big update for me in favor of all of this Gervais stuff. I can’t find a dataset that would tell me this, but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say. Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here. Finally, it just seems totally wrong to me that the highest-status and lowest-status members of groups/clubs/societies are legible, and everyone in the middle isn’t. I am thinking of some non-formal groups I belong to, and the highest- and lowest- status people are often as confusing as everyone else. The exceptions are formal organizations with presidents or whatever, but even there I couldn’t tell you who the lowest-status person is. VII. That last section might feel harsh, so I want to stress that I liked a lot of things about Gervais Principle. Gervais Principle feels like what psychoanalysis would be like if it weren’t so devoted to making itself incomprehensible. It explained its theories clearly and gave good examples of each. Even though it stuck to really traditional psychoanalytic ideas (the theory of people getting stuck at developmental stages is classic Freud - see eg anal-retentivity, oral fixation, etc) it vastly exceeded the source material in clarity, plausibility, and ability to avoid naming all of its concepts after barely-related bodily orifices. In particular, I feel like I better understand some of the ideas from Sadly, Porn. People’s desire to subject themselves to an order created by sociopaths. Everyone keeping a ledger of status transactions. Terror of acting openly, and how it breeds bureaucracy and excessive layers of management. It’s all in here. Lacan claimed there were three different personality structures: neurotic, psychotic, and pervert. Suggestive, but I can’t squeeze these into matching Rao’s triad. For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least. Likewise, Lacan says psychotics are incapable of using language normally, instead retreating to stock phrases - a suspiciously good match for Rao’s Clueless description. But Lacanian psychotics are most able to act and least dependent on other people’s approval, which is totally the opposite of Rao’s system. Clinical Introduction hints at a rare personality type who has passed beyond neurosis, and is able to have normal healthy self-motivated desires that are not just the desires of others. It doesn’t dwell on this type, because they rarely see psychoanalysts, but it sounds like a good match for Rao’s Sociopaths. That would mean we have to map all three main Lacanian types into Rao’s Clueless and Losers - but I have no idea how to do this faithfully. So I am less impressed by the typology itself than in the book’s ability to ask questions - or, more precisely, to make the reader ask questions. This is its “organizational literacy” - when confronting people or groups, you can ask things like: What narrative script is a person relying on in order to maintain their sense of specialness?
Inline links: anal-retentivity, oral fixation, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn?s=w, Clinical Introduction
Your Book Review: Exhaustion
August 05, 2022 · Original source
Would I recommend this book? Yes - it covers a lot of ground, including several aspects I’ve barely touched on here as I raced towards a discussion of modern CFS. Schaffner riffs on some other culprits including Saturn and other astrological bodies, exhaustion as a critique of capitalism in literary works, and includes a discussion of modern workplace burnout (which is what the ‘special and smart person’ humblebrag elements of neurasthenia appear to have evolved into). The book isn’t perfect – some of her literary examples seem a bit stretched (there’s an extended discussion of Jason and the Argonauts which conflates despair and exhaustion, as well as an off-base interpretation of Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia), there’s a chapter-long engagement with Freud’s idea of the death drive that seems to only tangentially touch on exhaustion, and she relies on some oversimplified psychiatric models of depression (not as simple as serotonin deficiency).
Inline links: not as simple as serotonin deficiency
Janus' Simulators
January 26, 2023 · Original source
And when I start thinking along these lines, I notice that psychologists since at least Freud, and spiritual traditions since at least the Buddha, have accused us of simulating a character. Some people call it the ego. Other people call it the self.
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
But Girard lost me with the part about the myths. Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). The same with most Bible stories (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments, etc). It kind of seems like the sort of thing where Freud can claim all myths are about castration. There are lots of myths, and they’re about lots of things. “Person does bad thing, the gods collectively punish humanity, then once we get rid of him the collective punishment stops” is certainly one trope. But it’s not hard to fathom why a primitive community stricken by a plague might think God was punishing them for some iniquity. And if I haven’t committed iniquity lately, and you haven’t committed iniquity lately, it must be some particular bad guy who needs to be stopped.
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
March 28, 2024 · Original source
Claim that he, Saar, through his years of experience testing Rootclaim, has some kind of special metis at using it, and everyone else is screwing up. Saar gestured at (2) in the debate, repeatedly emphasizing that Rootclaim was difficult and subtle. But he mostly talked about things like the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which all participants already knew about and were trying to avoid. Maybe he should go further. This wouldn’t necessarily be special pleading. When psychoanalysts claim their therapies work, they don’t mean that someone who just read a two page “What Is Psychoanalysis?” pamphlet can do good therapy. They mean that someone who spent ten years training under someone who spent ten years training and so on in a lineage back to Freud can do good therapy. When scientists say the scientific method works, they don’t mean that any crackpot who reads an Intro To Science textbook can figure out the mysteries of the universe. They mean someone who’s trained under other scientists and absorbed their way of thinking can do it. If Saar wants to convince people, I think he should abandon his debates - which wouldn’t help even if he won, and certainly don’t help when he loses - and train five people who aren’t him in how to do Rootclaim, up to standards where he admits they’re as good at it as he is. Then he should prove that those five people can reliably get the same answers to difficult questions, even when they’re not allowed to compare notes beforehand. That would be compelling evidence!8 The Aftermath: Pseudoscience Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it? The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true. Still, it’s awkward to use “conspiracy theory” as an insult when the conspiracies were real. Maybe a better question is whether lab leak is “pseudoscience”. The argument against: lots of smart people and experts believed it was a lab leak. There were all those virologists giving 50-50 odds in their internal conversations. Even Peter says he started out leaning lab leak, back in 2021 when everyone was talking about it. The argument in favor: since 2021, experts (and Peter) have shifted pretty far in favor of zoonosis. They’ve been convinced by new work - the identification of early cases, the wet market surveys, the genetic analysis. What category of noun does the adjective“pseudoscientific” describe? It doesn’t necessarily describe theories: Newtonian mechanics wasn’t pseudoscience when Newton discovered it, but if someone argued for it today (against relativity), that would be pseudoscientific. It doesn’t even describe arguments: “we don’t have enough data to confirm global warming” was a strong argument against global warming before there were good data, and a pseudoscientific one now. Might we place the locus of pseudoscientificness in people, communities, and norms of discussion? Peter’s position is that, although the lab leak theory is inherently plausible and didn’t start as pseudoscience, it gradually accreted a community around it with bad epistemic norms. Once lab leak became A Thing - after people became obsessed with getting one over on the experts - they developed dozens of further arguments which ranged from flawed to completely false. Peter spent most of the debate debunking these - Mr. Chen’s supposed 12/8 COVID case, Connor Reed’s supposed 11/25 COVID case, the rumors of WIV researchers falling sick, the 90 early cases supposedly “hidden” in a random paper, etc, etc, etc. Peter compares this to QAnon, where an early “seed” idea created an entire community of people riffing off of it to create more and more bad facts and arguments until they had constructed an entire alternative epistemic edifice. If we don’t accept the judges’ verdict, and think lab leak is true, are we worried the zoonosis side has some misbehavior of its own? Yuri and Saar didn’t talk about that as much. High-status people misbehave in different ways from low-status people; I think the zoonosis side has plenty of things to feel bad about (eg the conspiracies), but pseudoscience probably isn’t the right descriptor. The Aftermath: Ebb And Flow During the debate, Peter accused the lab leak side of being constantly left flat-footed by new evidence. Sure, it had seemed plausible back in 2020, but they’d had to scramble to explain a steady stream of pro-zoonosis papers. Afterwards, Saar and Yuri got some new evidence of their own. A Chinese team appeared to have found a T/T intermediate strain of COVID in Shanghai, possibly imported from very early in Wuhan. If true, it would provide new evidence against a double spillover, instead supporting Lineage A mutating into B in humans. (You can see Peter’s response here - basically that we’re not sure it’s a true intermediate and not a reversion - if it were true, how come the two strains on either side of it got millions of cases, and it just got one guy in Shanghai? But if it were true, it would still be compatible with zoonosis - Lineage A would have spread from an animal and quickly mutated into B, the first A case would have been someone who left the wet market for a nearby area, and the first B case would have been someone who stayed in the wet market.) Also, a new Freedom of Information Act request got early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal with new details, of which the most explosive was a comment by the American half of the team, reassuring the Chinese half that even though the proposal focused on American work to please funders, they would let the Chinese side do some “assays”. Lab leakers say this disproves the argument that, because DEFUSE said the work would be done in the US, the Wuhan Institute of Virology couldn’t/wouldn’t do advanced gain-of-function research. (I asked Peter his response - he said the original draft of DEFUSE also said that the Chinese side would do “live virus binding assays”, and this isn’t the kind of gain-of-function research necessary to make COVID.) In an email, Saar and Yuri suggested it was an “interesting coincidence” that all the new evidence that came out after the debate favored their side. I’ve decided against updating on these considerations - either Peter’s version or Saar/Yuri’s. My impression is that anyone who starts out believing something at time t will also believe all the new evidence after time t favors that thing. There’s also a pattern I want to discourage, where one side will come up with some new trivial finding, or re-dredge up and re-package something that everyone already everyone else had already considered, then release it as THE SMOKING GUN! Then they release another SMOKING GUN!, and another, and after five or six SMOKING GUNS, they say their opponents are stubborn and refuse to yield to evidence, since they’ve obstinately ignored every single SMOKING GUN! without changing their probability even a little bit. Overall I don’t think it’s useful to update on the exact contours of the ebb and flow of new evidence. Just treat new evidence the same as old evidence, updating your model the same amount as everything else. The Aftermath: Debate Some skeptic blogs picked up this story last month, and one of the points they made was that even if this one turned out well for their side, in general they’re against this kind of thing. Part of their argument was that debating “conspiracy theories” just helps spread and legitimize them. I’ve made fun of this position before, and I’ll make fun of it again now. According to polling, about 66% of Americans believe lab leak, compared to 16% who believe natural origin and 17% who aren’t sure. That means that people with an opinion on the issue are more than 4:1 in favor of lab leak. At some point you have to start debating! What are you waiting for? If you hold off so long that finally every single person in the world except you believes lab leak, would you still be sitting there, pristine in your imperturbability, saying from your lofty height “I refuse to engage, because that would be providing the rest of you oxygen”? The other part of the argument was that saying “I will debate all comers for an $X bet” is annoying, and we shouldn’t encourage that kind of thing. Certainly this technique has been used by bad actors - for example, the Holocaust denial group Institute For Historical Review offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could prove the Holocaust happened (it was eventually won by an Auschwitz survivor whose “proof” was that he saw his family led to the gas chambers; IHR failed to accept this; the survivor sued and won). Likewise, anti-vaccine multimillionaire Steve Kirsch has offered to bet $500,000 on the results of a debate about vaccines not working9 (Saar took him up on it and they’re continuing to hammer out the specifics). I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate. And taking people up on their offer, having a great debate that leaves everybody more enlightened and serves as a model for rational discourse, then having the right side win in the end - seems like the opposite of delegitimizing this strategy. I guess I classify this with all the other examples in Less Utilitarian Than Thou. Cool Machiavellian plot you have there, but maybe the fact that you’re losing 16%-66% should make you question whether you’re really as smart as you think you are, and whether your plan to suppress all discussion for the greater good is really the mastermind-level strategy you hoped it would be. It’s good to assert the true fact that these kinds of challenges are often dumb/rigged/useless, and that “nobody has yet responded to my challenge” isn’t a valid argument that someone’s necessarily right. But I stop short of trying to set some kind of social norm that nobody may respond to anyone else’s challenges, even if they think that person is being honest and has organized the challenge well (as Saar was and did). That almost seems like itself legitimizing the whole thing, in the sense of accepting that if someone loses a challenge then it means something important. I would rather place the illegitimacy where it belongs (a challenge really doesn’t prove anything, separate from the arguments made in it) and let people do what they want. I want to see more debates like this. I learned more watching the 15 hours of Rootclaim debate than I think I would have researching on my own for 15 hours. But a lot of things had to come together to make this work. Most of all, this debate worked out because the judges were two very smart scientists with relevant expertise. To get such good judges, lots of things had to fall into place. First, the debate itself had to be expensive enough that neither side begrudged paying the extra $5,000 per judge to hire the best people. And second, the debate had to be about a topic where lots of intelligent people haven’t yet made up their minds. If the debate was about flat earth, I would despair of finding good judges. Either the judges would already be convinced the Earth was round (which the flat Earth side would understandably refuse to accept). Or they would be 50-50, which would mean they were extremely weird people whose reasoning couldn’t be trusted. Flat Earth is an extreme example, but even a debate about COVID vaccines would be pushing it here. (since writing this, I learned Peter had made this same argument and analogy in a blog post on Kirsch; sorry for the unintentional plagiarism) I think I would genuinely update on the conclusion of any other Rootclaim debate with the same caliber of participants as this one, but not necessarily on whatever Steve Kirsch or the Institute of Historical Review comes up with, nor the next person to hit on the strategy of “I’ll pay you $100,000 if you prove me wrong!”10 The Aftermath: Conclusion This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons. First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. It’s a weird rabbit hole, which I’m not yet entirely out of. I have a weird urge to visit Wuhan as a tourist, see the Wuhan Institute of Virology, stroll through the Huanan Central Seafood Market (unfortunately closed), maybe eat a raccoon-dog. Second, some of the lessons of this debate are actionable. I’ve written before about how we should learn the lessons of lab leak even if it turns out to be false this time; that hasn’t changed. But this was a good reminder to also learn the lessons of zoonosis, for the same reason. We need more attention on closing wet markets and tracking weird Chinese wildlife. The DEFUSE proposal wanted to immunize bats - is this still a worthwhile idea? The virologists got a bad rap for wanting to gain-of-function exactly the pathogen that caused the century’s worst pandemic, but in a way that speaks well of them - they clearly knew what to be worried about. Has anyone mumbled an apology and asked them if they have any other useful predictions? Third, John Nerst has written about erisology, the study of disagreements. This was surely one of history’s greatest erisological studies. Two very smart people spent fifteen hours hashing out every argument and counterargument in good faith, then quantified all of their beliefs in a way that lets us figure out exactly where they differed and by how much. This isn’t entirely a victory - as a newly minted member of team zoonosis, I still can’t trace exactly why Saar is so sure I’m wrong. But if the COVID origin story fascinates me as this peek deep into a pestiferous underworld of sinister laboratories and reeking wet markets, something about this debate felt like analogous peek into the creepy subconscious swamps where disagreements begin. Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come. But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer . Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare. I look forward to the movie, especially seeing who plays the dashing young blogger who helped the participants meet. Other Resources Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate
Inline links: 8, appeared to have found, here, got early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal with new details, picked up this story, made fun of this position before, polling, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mohs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0e52ee7e-553d-4ad5-a0eb-701ad84be8cb_615x308.png, 9, Less Utilitarian Than Thou, in a blog post on Kirsch, 10, erisology, Daniel Filan’s running Twitter commentary of the debate
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist. Freudians discovered so many things that it would take ten books of this length to even begin to talk about them.
Nineteenth-century anthropologists didn’t bother to invent a grand Theory of Everything about this one. They thought it was obvious: mother-in-laws suck. Hiatt writes that Freud believed that the custom “had a good deal to commend it”, and he cites a letter from the great psychologist to his fiancee where he said of his own impending mother-in-law that she was “alien and will always remain so to me. I seek for similarities with you, but find hardly any … I can foresee more than one opportunity of making myself disagreeable to her and I don’t intend to avoid them”. This is funny, but also raises the question: if so many primitive societies have mother-in-law taboos, and our more “liberated” society still has an expectation and archetype that sons will hate their mother-in-laws, are these coming from the same place? And what is that place?
Many Aboriginal conflicts involve screaming insults at each other, and many of those insults are sexual. So an Aboriginal man hearing a conflict with his sister probably hears a lot of descriptions of her genitals, sexual proclivities, etc. Maybe this is awkward enough that he feels the need to signal how aroused he isn’t the most dramatic way he knows how - trying to impale her with a spear (this signal would not have survived Freudian psychology). And maybe, just to hammer in how little he gets aroused by sisters, he has to try to impale all of them with spears.
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist” or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the intellect.
Inline links: Reaction formation
Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
I have seen people try to walk this back by saying Adams only meant they would be persecuted in some way that was metaphorically equivalent to hunting, but I feel like “good chance you will be dead within the year” is saying he means the kind of hunting which literally kills you, and “police will stand down” means that it will be the sort of extremely illegal thing that police would normally react to. I have seen other people try to link this to examples of Republicans actually getting killed, such as Charlie Kirk. But Adams was telling his readers there was “a good chance” that “they” would be dead within a year, which I think implies this fate happening to a significant proportion of ordinary Republicans, not just one prominent person. Also, Kirk was five years after the comment was posted. Can we dismiss this as a joke? I think Adams has used the manipulation technique of saying things that might or might not be jokes and then strategically sticking to them or saying “What? Me? I was only joking! Haha! You can’t take a joke!” depending on which was more convenient to him at that exact second, enough times that I’m not comfortable letting him have that escape. Also, when I was replying to Joel Pollak about this, I happened to glance at his Twitter account, and one of the top tweets was a repost of someone saying that “The Democrat playbook is to arrest every single person who disagrees with them”. I think if I forced Pollak into some kind of extremely literal frame of mind - maybe asked him to bet money on whether I could tweet the words “the Democrats are wrong about immigration” in my Democrat-controlled state without getting arrested - he would admit that, okay, they don’t want to arrest literally every single person who disagrees with them. He was exaggerating for effect, probably in much the way he’s going to say that Scott Adams was exaggerating for effect. You say stuff like “The Democrats are going to HUNT YOU DOWN and LITERALLY MURDER YOU. They will TORTURE YOUR FAMILY and RAPE YOUR DAUGHTER and EAT YOUR PETS and TURN YOUR HOUSE INTO A CHURCH OF SATAN”, and what you mean is “I disagree with the Democrats and sometimes they go overboard cancelling people”. I have a post called If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It. My thesis is that tolerating claims of “directional correctness” - the thing where someone asks to get a pass because even if they said wasn’t literally true, it “points to” an “emotionally correct” thing - is eventually totally corrosive. It means everyone ratchets up their claims to the highest level they think they can get away with (ie walk back later if challenged, as a motte and bailey). And then you end up with this miasma where maybe 5% of people totally believe you, and 50% of people sort of absorb the connotation and think something like that is true, and then people get terrified of the Democrats and think of them as monsters and treat politics as an existential struggle where they will genuinely get arrested or murdered unless they do it to the Democrats first, and then you get a civil war or something. I think Adams and Pollak’s milieu has in fact reached this point, and their love for these kinds of exaggerations is a big part of the cause. Adams was one of the funniest people in the world. If he was actually telling a joke, you could tell by the fact that you were laughing hysterically. “Democrats will hunt and kill you” isn’t funny. I’ll refrain from judgment about whether it was Adams’ sincerely held belief, some kind of annoying manipulation attempt, or whether Adams even recognized a difference between the two. But I think judging him on the fact that it didn’t happen is completely within bounds. … 3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece … Zanzibar BuckBuck McFate writes: This business where boomers are tolerant of contradictions and find them amusing whereas millennials are horrified is a dynamic I've noticed as well, it seems to be true in politics also, I myself feel this hunger to be authentic all the time. I think it has something to do with the difficulty children have in putting negativity in context. They can't distinguish between a parent having a bad day and venting, or having an existential crisis. So the 50s guy was half right - you don't have to love your boss in your heart of hearts but careful what you say to your kids. Feral Finster writes: » “This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.” Compare with the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers. Yeah, it’s interesting to compare Rao and Adams. Rao formulated his Gervais Principle as a specific response to Adams’ Dilbert Principle, which I guess means Rao thought Adams got it wrong. Did he? The Pointy Haired Boss seems to go back and forth between Clueless and Sociopath, which is probably why Rao thought Adams’ work fell short. Dogbert is clearly Sociopath, but has no permanent role in the corporation, and doesn’t really represent a real thing you can be - his character was a ridiculous scammer who succeeded at near-impossible endeavours (like convincing people he was a Nostradamus-style mystical prophet) because the logic of the strip demanded it. Later, Adams foregrounded the CEO character more, maybe to create a purer Sociopath, letting the Boss go closer to Clueless. This is making me somewhat regret accusing Adams of wanting to be the Pointy-Haired Boss. It would have been fairer (and less of an accusation/surprise) to accuse him of wanting to be Dogbert. But again, Dogbert doesn’t represent a real thing you could be, which might have been why the PHB made a better metaphor. (contra my claim, the cover of Win Bigly shows a mashup of Dogbert and Trump. Fine, Dogbert is a thing one person can be.) You can read my full review of The Gervais Principle here. cincilator writes: Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you. Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it. To spell it out more explicitly: All nerds must eventually realize they’re not going to immediately dominate everything by intellect alone. This isn’t because intellect isn’t great, it’s because 1) it’s only one of many skills, and 2) you probably aren’t even the person with the most intellect. Again, every mildly-talented person has to face this realization, whether it’s a nerd realizing he won’t be the next Einstein or a jock realizing he won’t be the next LeBron. If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says no, I really am the next Einstein, ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub4. If they just deal with it maturely instead of spinning up maladaptive defenses against it, they’re a nerd who is hopefully good-natured and accepting of their nerdiness, and hopefully does some good work in some specific small area, and changes the world in some specific small way (or some very large way, if they can work together with other people and get lucky). Bugmaster writes: I think Adams is basically correct. Yes, facts and evidence do exist and are real; but they have virtually no impact on anything socially important -- i.e., on anything important whatsoever. Memes and charisma and persuasion are what matters if you want to achieve life goals that extend beyound yourself and your immediate family. I worry that Adams (and you) are doing something where unless the average person can solve every problem by facts and intelligence alone, then facts+intelligence lose and memes and persuasion win. But the average person also can’t solve every problem by memes+persuasion alone! If Dilbert is an 80th percentile nerd, the 80th percentile persuader is - I don’t know, a used-car salesman? Dilbert’s probably earning more money, especially nowadays when he could make L5 at Google. And if Donald Trump is a 99.9999th percentile persuader, the 99.9999th percentile nerd is Ilya Sutskever. Probably most people would slightly prefer being Trump to Sutskever, but Sutksever does have a couple billion dollars, plus the more ethereal rewards of genius; it still seems like a pretty good deal. I also think you’re doing a sort of black-and-white thinking here. Every day, great persuaders like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes end up in jail, because in fact the things that they said were true were not true. Every day, smooth-talking charismatic manipulators successfully seduce the girl into bed with them, then totally fail to turn it into a happy stable marriage, because after a few years even the dumbest woman catches on and figures out whether her mate provides real value or not. Even Donald Trump has only a 37% approval rating, because he can’t make “we should alienate our allies over Greenland” sound plausible to most of the American people. When someone’s very good at it, persuasion sometimes helps them blur facts around the edges. But that’s it. Nobody except Scott Adams and a few psychotherapists ever go to hypnotist school. Most don’t even go to any formal persuasion classes. That’s because hypnotism/persuasion isn’t really a lifehack that helps you win all the time at everything. If the world’s best hypnotist asked a room of VCs for money with a stupid business plan, he would probably fail. This isn’t to say persuasion is useless, and in certain fields it can be very powerful indeed. But let’s not go crazy and start worshipping it. The grass is always greener on the other side. The nerd sits in his cubicle and thinks “If only I were more charismatic.” But the salesman with the bright teeth and the firm handshake thinks “Man, I bet I could get out of this dead-end job if only I were smarter.”5 … 4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST) … Ilya Lozovsky writes: Ninety percent of this essay is brilliant — smarter and realer than anything anyone else has written about Adams — but the end lost me. It's too generous, to the point of being a whitewash. Adams was vicious and hateful and played a material role in convincing Americans to vote for actual fascism. I don't think it's right to "hand it to him." JJ McCullough (JJM’s Shortstack) writes: Good essay, but I think you kinda yadda-yadda'd away his racist rant, which was extremely explicit and extended. I think it was the opposite of a "bog-standard cancellation," which we think of as being a slightly unfair, overzealous policing of an at least slightly subjectively offensive comment, often from years ago. But Scott went on quite a long diatribe about why black people, as a group, are dangerous and undesirable to be around, and why he, personally, goes out of his way to avoid them. Some conservatives have tried to use "bog-standard" anti-woke logic in defending him, but no, his comments really are quite explicitly and undeniably racist, if that term has any useful definition at all. Alex Wotbot writes: Now, you quoted Adams saying: “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away” If this was the intended point, does it really make sense that only the far-left freaked out? It’s kind of important to mention this was within a hypothetical. Suppose a survey reported that 26% of a population believes “The phrase ‘It’s OK to be blonde’ is hate speech” and another 21% weren’t sure if they agree with the statement or not. Now suppose you were blonde, would you hang around that population? Now go read the February 2022 Rasmussen Reports survey. Please do better than this, I don’t want to have to Gell-Mann memoryhole this. Many people had strong opinions on this, so I have to respond to it. But first, I want to make it extra clear in capital letters: I AM DOING THIS IN THE COMMENTS POST, TO RESPOND TO YOUR COMMENTS, AND NOT BECAUSE I THINK IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Certain people screenshotted the one paragraph of my ten thousand word essay that discussed this and posted it on Twitter, in order to make it look like I was joining in some kind of chorus of liberals reducing Adams to his worst moment. I posted what I thought was a no-nonsense, factual description of what happened, in order not to be accused of hiding it or covering it up. It was the least important part of my essay, I’m aware that writing about it at all opens me to attack from both sides, and I discuss it here only to respond to all of you who wanted to know my opinion on it. Just don’t screenshot it on Twitter and say “LOOK SCOTT IS STILL HARPING ON THE RACE THING”, that’s all I’m asking. That having been said… To make sure we’re all on the same page - Adams’ comments were prompted by this poll, conducted February 2023. The question was: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’” Among blacks, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, and 21% were “not sure”. Among whites, the numbers were 81/7/13. Here’s the video of Adams’ comments: Transcript: If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people - according to this poll, not according to me - that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f**k away. Wherever you have to go. Just get away. Cause there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. You just have to escape. That’s what I did. I went to a neighborhood with a very low black population. Because unfortunately, there’s a high correlation between the density - this is according to Don Lemon, here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, who said when he lived in a mostly black neighborhood, there were a bunch of problems he didn’t see in white neighborhoods. So even Don Lemon sees a big difference, for your quality of living, based on where you live and who’s there. So I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. Because there’s no longer a rational impulse. And so I’m… I’m gonna, uh, I’m gonna back off from being helpful to black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. Like I’ve been doing it all my life, and I’ve been… the only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. [cackles] It makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white… it’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying. Is this racist? I have a piece called Against Murderism, where I talk about why it’s so hard for people to agree on questions about “racism”. The summary: although it would be possible to have someone be purely, axiomatically racist - having it be a premise of their reasoning that they hate black people - in practice few people are like this. More typically, people have some argument more like: I don’t like [specific bad thing]
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KA_U!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2cb6162-0262-4c4c-8048-e8355f38967a_900x280.gif, If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It, writes, writes, the famous observation that executives are sociopaths, management are clueless, and the workers losers, The Gervais Principle, writes, 4, writes, 5, writes, JJM’s Shortstack, writes, writes, this poll, Against Murderism